Following Microsoft Teams Channels: Show/Hide and Notifications Guide

Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Tech Tips

There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft Teams is a better platform to organize and control communication than e-mail. What’s the problem with e-mail? As Byron Patrick wrote in the Journal of Accountancy, e-mail “results in locust-like infestations of individual e-mails overwhelming inboxes, eating up user time, and creating innumerable opportunities for confusion and delay.”

With topic-specific channels and threaded messages, Teams can help you stop drinking from the fire hose of information. To give an example of a CPA firm environment, a team may have channels for departments (audit, tax, advisory), clients, service lines, industry specialties, and maybe a fun “watercooler” channel full of cat pictures. It’s worth spending some time adjusting what channels are shown and your notification settings. If you’re not familiar with how to do either of these, check out these pages from the Microsoft site:

• Show, hide, or pin a team or channel in Teams
• Manage notifications in Teams

The key is to go through your list of channels and individually adjust these settings to strike a balance between being responsive and productive. If you have notifications turned on with banner and feed for every channel, your day will be filled with interruptions. I created a table that might be helpful for you as you do this:

A couple friends and I started a Facebook group called “Microsoft Teams for CPAs.” If you want to share ideas and best practices for using Teams within an accounting firm, we’d love for you to join us!

Tags: Teams

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